Re: Garbage display when NULL in file

[Miles Bader]

Gregory Sharp <gregsharp.geo@yahoo.com> writes:
> Yes!  Thank you for the hint.  The following also works:
>
>   C-x RET c utf-8 RET C-x C-f your-file RET
>
> Why doesn't emacs use utf-8 (my locale codeset) for this file?  

Your data files (apparently) contain code sequences which are invalid
utf-8, so emacs (quite reasonably I think) by default then decides they
must not be encoded using utf-8, and tries to find some other coding
system that appears to work.

By using the above command, you've overridden the default behavior and
told emacs to use utf-8 despite the bogus encoding.

The info node `(emacs) Recognize Coding' talks about this.

-Miles

-- 
Somebody has to do something, and it's just incredibly pathetic that it
has to be us.  -- Jerry Garcia